Enhancing Local Leadership in Indonesia

WUSC will oversee academic exchanges between Canadian and Indonesian universities. The program will help identify resources and organize scholarship placements and study tours in Canadian universities, colleges and ministries. The ISM team is responsible for administering and monitoring students studying in Canada under scholarship, as well as planning, designing, evaluating, and participating in short term projects and other LLD activities. The exchanges will help strengthen Islamic education networks and Canadian universities with relevant experience in community development.

What We're Doing:

WUSC’s Local Leadership for Development will improve the abilities of the government and Islamic State University by:

Linking Canadian universities and experts with their Indonesia counterparts through internships, scholarships, exchanges administered by the International Student Management

Performing community outreach

Providing career-orientation and skills training for participants to find jobs or entrepreneurship

Democracy is still relatively new to Indonesia, having been reborn with the fall of Soeharto and major political and governance reforms in 1998. Given 40 years of authoritarian rule, both Indonesian civil society and government have concentrated on establishing the basic forms of democracy. Serious challenges still remain including delivery of better services, the further opening up of governance processes and improving the economic climate.

Through the Ministry of Religious Affairs (MORA) and the Islamic Higher Education System (IHES) thousands of graduates become firmly rooted in the communities where they work and are well positioned to work for enhanced good democratic governance for the greater good of society.

For the purposes of LLD, the community-focused service and outreach activities of the two Islamic institutions (UIN Makassar and IAIN Surabaya) are of major interest because their faculties, departments and centers carry out a wide range of other activities in communities and are responsible for university outreach to various communities.

WUSC's Local Leadership for Development (LLD) program is funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and jointly implemented with Cowater International Inc.